Millennials: Generation "Why?"

Millennials: Generation “Why?”


As it is known, the phrase Generation Y first appeared in an August 1993 Advertising Age (or AdAge) magazine, which was started as a broadsheet newspaper in Chicago in 1930 and since then has been delivering news, analysis and data on marketing and media. The 1993 editorial described teenagers of the day, which they defined as different from Generation X (the generation born after the Western Post–World War II baby boom with birth dates from the early 1960s to the early 1980s), and then aged 11 or younger as well as the teenagers of the upcoming ten years.

Generation Y has been studied since the 1980s. Even as long as 30 years ago, these young people were expected to fare differently in the future than their parents had before. Why is such interest in and, above all, criticism of this particular generation of Americans?

Generation Y are under attack from the U.S. mainstream news media that has labeled Millennials “spoiled”. The general premise is that the Generation Y has failed to grow up and mature enough to be able to face the harsh realities of economic life outside of their parents’ house. Various polls and surveys among high school seniors and college students have been conducted continuously since 1975 by various U.S. institutions to highlight the shift in mentality of the Millennials from the previous generations.

The proportion of students who said being wealthy was very important to them has been steadily increasing from Baby Boomers and Gen Xers to Millennials. Meanwhile, it has been repeatedly stressed that the percentage of those who said it was important to keep up to date with political affairs, developing a meaningful philosophy of life, or becoming involved in various social programs like cleaning up the environment has considerably dropped for Millennials.

In some of the most recent takes on the issue, Time magazine has called the under-35 “Millennial generation” “lazy, entitled, selfish and shallow”.

Slate.com reports: “They often are unable to think for themselves”.

Business Insider says: “They don’t necessarily understand the value of money because many of them have no experience with it, and yet, incredibly dichotomously, they think they deserve to be highly paid”.

It looks like the mainstream news media has been unofficially issued a go-ahead command to disparage and vilify the Generation Y and make them look solely responsible for the woes and troubles of the economy over the past two decades. Millennials do have difficulty adjusting to todays’ world. The world is changing too fast. The world has changed very much over the past 20-30 years both economically and politically. The world has been changing too fast recently.


According to an article by Megan Crepeau (http://www.redeyechicago.com), young people under 35 are not to blame for their difficulties in current economic situation, as recent data reveal that, at least when it comes to money, Millennials are far more careful than their “spoiled” reputation would suggest. Pew Research Center’s research last year on the state of the Millennial wallet revealed that the under-35 crowd are more financially cautious than their parents’ generation.

Lisa Kahn of Yale’s School of Management tracked the economic success of those who graduated from college during the recession of the early 1980s. Even decades later, their earnings lagged behind those who graduated in better times. She theorizes that those who grow up in hard times may be less likely to feel confident taking risks. Millennials has entered adulthood in times which could be best described as turbulent and much more violent politically as opposed to the Post World War II period. Those political turmoils of the early 1980s, 1990s, and 2000s have taken a great toll on the U.S. and global economy. It is that political turmoil that has rendered U.S. domestic economy as well as global economic situation so unstable and unpredictable.

The younger generation, during this period, had inevitably found itself in a world far too different from what their parents were preparing them to live in and so rapidly changing before their very eyes that Millennials had to cut back their economic expectations but were unwilling to put up with the notion that they were expected to cut back their consumption.

Perhaps the most accurate explanation of the reasons behind the problems of the Millennials has been given by someone who has a first-hand experience of them. Lisa Murphy, 24, who lives in Bronzeville with her grandmother, said, “I feel like a lot of our gripe is that we inherited an economy where we aren’t able to thrive,” “The ‘work hard’ rhetoric that’s been given to us doesn’t really hold true anymore, because the economy is so different. The job market is so different.”

In a situation when economy is changing and job market is no longer what it used to be relatively recently, Millennials have to adapt and they do it the way most people would under the like conditions when prioritized national security concerns and global politics dictate the course of economy in the country.

According to Pew Research Center’s report last year, households headed by people younger than 35 carry less credit card debt than older households. The share of those households holding any kind of debt has dropped to its lowest level since the U.S. government started keeping track in 1983.

The Pew’s report also found that young people are buying cars and houses at a slower rate than previous generations did. “In short, after living through a financial crisis that led to the worst recession in generations, Millennials have become cautious: shunning, or at least delaying, traditional financial milestones that once were markers of adulthood.”

In short, Millennials have found themselves in an economic situation that has forced them to spend less than their parents did when they were transitioning from “young adults” to “adulthood”. Millennials have been made to postpone the “traditional financial milestones” (buying cars, houses, etc.) and found themselves stuck in “young adult” phase to the point when they have to live in their parents’ houses and use their cars and appliances rather than going into debt and buying all those items for themselves. In an economic sense their “young adult” phase has become permanent, as they are less likely to overcome the current economic hurdles and be able in the nearest future to afford those items of economic “adulthood”.

Thus, accusing Millennials of being “spoiled” and failing mentally and emotionally to reach “adulthood” is wrong and unsavory, if not hypocritical in itself. People belonging to Generation Y are Generation “Young” economically, doomed for the most part to spend the rest of their lives in this state.

So far, Generation Y are too young biologically and too immersed in their current day-to-day problems -- torn between trying to preserve their inherited spending habits on the one hand and the need to spend less and less and save more for a rainy day on the other -- to question the underlying reasons of their disadvantaged economic situation. So far, these young people can be all characterized as Generation “Young” until they become mature enough, not economically but emotionally and intellectually, to even begin to question why this occurred and why they were forced to live poorer lives, doomed to be spent in what has been considered “young adulthood” economic and financial phase.

But at some point in time in the future they will begin to ask those questions and then Generation Y will no longer be just Generation “Young” but Generation “Why” as they will demand answers why the whole generation of America had been left to live in poverty. Needless to say that their children will also be poor. One generation of economic hopelessness and misery will inevitably result in the next generation being less expectant of future economic advantages. Millennials will be asking questions which their children will find the right answers to and 50 years from now, perhaps even sooner, the seeds of deception and treachery sown in the previous times will render their fruits.

Millennials, those born in the early 1980s, are already in their 30s, now. Almost all research material, including Pew Research Center’s reports, related to the studies of economic situation of the Generation Y, focus on 1982-1983 as the pivotal years when the situation with economic conditions for the teenagers of the day had begun to change. Visible as well as invisible factors began to factor in contributing to certain changes in the U.S. economy. Policies of the U.S. government began to change in a way that it affected subsequent economic developments not only in the U.S. but the world over.

The years 1982 and 1983 are very important as they witnessed the seminal events that eventually have led to a very sinister and precarious economic situation in the U.S. when decades later a whole generation of Americans would be sacrificed in terms of economic opportunities and many people all around the globe would be faced with sudden economic challenges of epic proportions.

Even if the War on Terror, also known as the Global War on Terrorism (GWOT), has not been announced officially by the U.S. in the aftermath of the 11 September 2001 terrorist attacks, economic and financial repercussions of that policy would inevitably point to the factual evidence of the country being in a state of war. The United States declared this war and ever since many other NATO and non-NATO nations such as Pakistan have been participating in this conflict. But the truth is that this war did not begin in 2001. It began in 1982-1983.

Since war-related policies by the U.S. government have become the reason why economy in the U.S. and the world over has eventually undergone such a dramatic and rapid transformation, it is necessary to look into the seminal events that had triggered such drastic changes in the U.S. foreign policy, which eventually has led to drastic economic changes, leaving the Generation Y the ultimate losers as the result.

The pivotal events of 1982-1983 -- the years from which a new generation of young Americans would ever since be defined by demographers, historians and commentators as drastically different from the Generation X -- begin with Lebanese Civil War and the attempted assassination of Israeli ambassador Shlomo Argov in London June 3 1982 by the Abu Nidal Organization, a splinter group of Fatah. In retaliation, Israel carried out an aerial attack on PLO and PFLP targets in West Beirut that led to over 100 casualties. The PLO responded by launching a counterattack from Lebanon with rockets and artillery, which constituted a clear violation of the then ceasefire.

Those events led to Israeli invasion of Lebanon, siege of Beirut, escalating violence and civilian casualties, and eventually the U.S.-negotiated truce of August 12 1982 which called for the withdrawal of both Israeli and PLO elements, as well as a multinational force composed of U.S. Marines along with French and Italian units that would ensure the departure of the PLO and protect defenseless civilians.

The first troops of a multinational force landed in Beirut August 21 1982. The most pivotal events took place as a result of 17 May Agreement of 1983 that included intentionally provocative statement that "the state of war between Israel and Lebanon has been terminated and no longer exists." Subsequently resurging violence and the “period of chaos” witnessed the beginning of attacks against multinational force units in Beirut, Lebanon. April 18 1983, a suicide attack at the U.S. Embassy in West Beirut killed 63.

In September 1983, following the Israeli withdrawal and the ensuing battles between the Lebanese Army and opposing factions for control of key terrain during the Mountain War, the Reagan White House approved the use of naval gunfire to subdue Druze and Syrian positions in order to allegedly give support to and protect the Lebanese Army. Against the vigorous opposition of Secretary of Defense Caspar Weinberger, Reagan then ordered Marine commanders to call in air strikes and other attacks against the Muslims and initiated a two-week-long bombardment by American warships, including the battleship USS New Jersey. Such a move had dramatically put the U.S. in the limelight as an active participant in the regional hostilities, severely undermining the U.S. status of a noncombatant peacekeeper as part of a multinational force.

Meanwhile, disregarding the tensions and hostility rising against the multinational forces stationed in Beirut, U.S. Marine commanders were given orders to ensure that the mission precluded fortifications at their compound at Beirut International Airport that might suggest the Marines weren't peacekeepers -- such as a perimeter fence that would stop anything bigger than a car. Similarly, sentries directly facing the airport were ordered to carry their ammunition on their belts -- not in their rifles --as if to avoid an accidental shooting.

Adding to its vulnerability, the U.S. Marine compound was deliberately surrounded by high ground occupied by Muslim militia artillery. So to Marines leery of gunfire, the compound's sturdy, four-story cinderblock building seemed like a haven. When in reality it was intended to become their tomb.

Realistically, the U.S. Marines had become “sitting ducks” from the moment they entered Beirut.
According to Col. Timothy J. Geraghty, the commander of the Marines in Beirut: “It didn’t take a military expert to realize that our troops had been placed in an indefensible situation. Anyone following the situation in Lebanon in ordinary news reports could realize a tragedy was in the making.

“There was a growing feeling of frustration inside the Muslim and Druse community in Lebanon due to the United States’ direct backing of Israel in its 1982 invasion of Lebanon and other pro-Israel factions within Lebanon. These factions had been responsible for multiple attacks committed against the Muslim and Druse Lebanese population.”

In his autobiography, then Maj. Gen. Colin Powell observed: “Since (the Muslims) could not reach the battleship, they found a more vulnerable target — the exposed Marines at the airport.”

From the outset, the American embassy in Beirut had sent numerous cables warning Washington that the U.S. activities in the region would provoke terrorism and undermine America’s standing in the Mideast. But there was no response.

Such controversial steps taken by the U.S. leadership could have been known for the geostrategic effect that the consequences of a possible tragic outcome would entail for the U.S. and the world; and they have have their clear explanation in retrospect. Likewise tricks had been pulled by the U.S. military leadership before. For Americans, Beirut was to become a seminal moment on a timeline that eventually led to the 9/11 attacks, Afghanistan, Iraq and beyond. It was to become a first shot in a clash with a “militant, fundamentalist Islam” that was to replace Soviet communism as the chief adversary.

October 23, 1983, in Beirut, Lebanon two truck bombs struck separate buildings housing United States and French military forces. In the attack on the building serving as a barracks for the 1st Battalion 8th Marines (Battalion Landing Team -- BLT 1/8), the death toll was 241 American servicemen: 220 Marines, 18 sailors and three soldiers.

It was the deadliest single-day death toll for the United States Marine Corps since World War II's Battle of Iwo Jima, the deadliest single-day death toll for the United States military since the first day of the Vietnam War's Tet Offensive, and the deadliest single attack on Americans overseas since World War II. Another 128 Americans were wounded in the blast. Thirteen later died of their injuries, and they are numbered among the total number who died.

It was the second deadly truck bombing in Beirut in a matter of months, and the first of two that occurred that day. The U.S. embassy in Beirut was hit by a truck bomb in April 1983 that killed 63 people, 17 of them Americans, and a second suicide bomber on October 23, 1983, drove into the barracks of a French detachment in West Beirut within minutes of the first explosion and blew up their living quarters, taking the lives of 58 paratroopers inside.

Ever since, many of the survivors have shared their memories of that horrific day.
That Sunday morning, Sgt. Stephen Russell was sitting in his guard booth outside a barracks in Beirut. He was one of about 1,600 Marines who'd been sent to Lebanon as neutral peacekeepers but found little peace to keep. He says he heard something snap behind him and a diesel engine revving. He turned.

What he saw, at 6:22 a.m. that bright Sunday in the fourth decade of the Cold War, was the future, coming straight at him, in the form of a 5-ton truck. The yellow Mercedes truck had plowed through the Marine compound's barbed-wire perimeter and was speeding toward the building immediately behind his booth, where hundreds of men slept.

The truck passed between two sentry posts. Russell says the sentries' rifles, as ordered, were unloaded. Neither got off a shot. Russell grabbed his .45-caliber pistol and stepped from the booth. He would not be able to stop the truck. Russell says he had run into the building's lobby, which was a courtyard open to the outside with an atrium reaching to the roof, with the truck gaining on him. He yelled: "Hit the deck!"

The truck had plowed through Russell's guard booth and cut open sandbags around it, flooding the lobby with sand. Russell dashed out the opposite side of the building, where he turned to see the truck roll to a halt in the center of the lobby. There was a flash, and fire spread across the truck's grill. The last thing Russell remembered was a wave of intense heat. When Russell came to, he was lying inside a cloud of gray ash. The building was a pile of rubble.
"That SOB!" Russell said to himself. "He did it."

The blast lifted the building as much as a foot off the ground. Then the floors pancaked down, killing many of those inside… Rooftop sentries saw the truck disappear into the building, according to a Defense Department report on the bombing.
Moments later, the roof buckled and one sentry, Cpl. Robert Calhoun, rode one slab all the way to the ground. He walked out of the rubble in his bare feet.

Stephen Russell, who now lives in Bellingham, Mass., says he can still hear the voices of the wounded and dying in Beirut. He still wonders how he could have been so close to the blast and survived. He says his nightmares are so violent and frequent that he sleeps alone, on the floor, sometimes near the fireplace. He hasn't spent the night in the same bed as his wife in years.
He says he blames himself for what happened, although no one else does.
"I could have done something else, but it happened too fast," he says.
"I'm sorry. I'm sorry I was there."

By 6:15 that Sunday morning, the compound was beginning to stir. Cpl. John Chipura, a radio operator from Brooklyn, was walking toward the barracks when he ran into a buddy going in the opposite direction. He stopped to chat, he later told his family. Because he'd stopped to talk, John Chipura was still 50 yards from the barracks when it collapsed. He joined a horde of other Marines on the rubble pile searching for survivors.

John Chipura, who luckily stopped to chat en route to the barracks, subsequently left the Marines and, like his father and brother, became a New York City fireman. He was scheduled to get married in October 2001. But on September 11, 2001, he was last seen running up into the south tower of the burning World Trade Center.

The Reagan administration attempted to deflect blame for the attack with a deluge of false statements and misrepresentations. In a televised speech four days after the bombing, the president insisted the attack was unstoppable, erroneously declaring that the truck crashed through a series of barriers, including a chain-link fence and barbed-wire entanglements, and argued that the U.S. mission was succeeding.

Despite the fact that Reagan had dispatched the Marines into an impossible situation and then had issued orders that led to their inability to defend themselves, he suffered relatively little criticism from the press or partisan opponents, and after months of vigorous campaigning was overwhelmingly re-elected the following year.

According to some U.S. investigators, it contrasts deeply with the controversy over the attack on the U.S. consulate in Benghazi, Libya, where on September 11, 2012 U.S. Ambassador Chris Stevens and three other Americans were assassinated. Within hours of that attack, and with no evidence as to how or why it had occurred or how it could have been prevented, presidential candidate Mitt Romney broke from what has long been traditional political protocol in situations of this type and attacked President Barack Obama, accusing him of sympathizing with anti-American interests in the Muslim world.

While the Benghazi attack was certainly a tragedy, and the possibility of a cover-up of what was initially known by the administration is still open to question, it pales in comparison with the “errors” in judgment by the Reagan administration, effectively run by the then Vice President George H.W. Bush, who also made a tour around the site of the Beirut barracks bombing two days after the explosion. Most certainly he had been instrumental in secret preparations that led to the Beirut bombing and blatant cover-up that followed.

Secretary of Defense Weinberger, in a September 2001 FRONTLINE interview, reaffirmed that a rift occurred in White House counsel when he claimed that the U.S. still lacks “actual knowledge of who did the bombing' of the Marine barracks.” Meanwhile, U.S. experts like Jack Matthews, a retired lieutenant colonel who commanded the Marine battalion before the bombing and later wrote a doctoral dissertation about it, would spread the word of that attack and speculate how it gave a boost to terrorism. "That's where the bad guys in the world today got their first bragging rights," says Eric Hammel, author of “The Root: The Marines in Beirut, a history of the bombing”.

Following the U.S.' lead, the rest of the multinational force, the British, French and Italians, was withdrawn from Lebanon by the end of February 1984. But the true result of the Beirut incident has been the beginning of a new chapter in the U.S. foreign policy planning. The 1983 bombings were the start of the war on terrorism that would last for decades to come and were a precursor of what was to come on September 11, 2001 in America. Their original impunity has driven the imagination of the evil masterminds of those carefully orchestrated marginal attacks beyond any proportion.

Besides the scandalous criminal aspect of the treasonous nature of some of the U.S. leaders’ actions with regard to October 23, 1983 bombings in Beirut, Lebanon, September 11, 2001 attacks in New York and Washington, and September 11, 2012 attack in Benghazi, Libya, the direct consequence of the U.S. government taking the path of frenzied global war has eventually become an economy that is subjected to the needs of wartime policy making in Washington and to the whims of the top U.S. military leadership and its cronies in a novel economic situation in the country, where the rules of the game change dramatically and nobody wants to left on the sidelines.

Unfortunately for the young and the elderly, in this situation of self-inflicted wartime economy of government budget deficits and depression, the most vulnerable are doomed to struggle to survive. Notwithstanding the arbitrary militaristic agenda that is largely based on self-fulfilling prophecies by the top leaders of the higher echelons of the U.S. Military Industrial Complex, the troubles of the every-day economy are real and bear the hardest upon the young generation of people who all of a sudden find themselves in an economic world that is different from what they had been told they were living in.

Therefore, it is not only unwise to blame Millennials for their hardships but it also smacks of a cover-up by the militaristic, greedy, and scared Cold-War-minded leaders of the former and present-day administrations trying to divert public opinion from the real cause of today’s economic troubles. The young Americans have been unduly deprived of their share of economic benefits! To say nothing about the innocently killed American soldiers, including the Marines that had died in Beirut in 1983, the Generation Y has become true victims of a plot by a group of fascist-minded individuals with the notorious Bush clan among them who have hurled their country into a war with an enemy they themselves had created and financed…

Today, those same criminals advocate the government’s more active role in attempting to secure American individuals from unseen drastic changes in the market, while their sell-out news media continue to accuse the young Americans of being “lazy” and “entitled”. It is not the habits of the Generation Y that will eventually produce the decisive effect on the U.S. economy one way or another. As long as the U.S. leadership continues its policy of war, the economy will demonstrate all the patterns of an economy in constant depression.

War -- as a source of prosperity for the American economy in the 20th century -- has run out its course. The last attempt by the U.S. warmongering politicians to extend that paradigm of the U.S. foreign policy has resulted in Generation Y. What would the next one be in this case?